India, May 23 -- Anyone who has written or read a word on football in English owes a debt of gratitude to Brian Glanville, who died on Friday aged 93. The late Patrick Barclay, an excellent writer on the beautiful game and an even better raconteur, as I found out on a cold, sunny afternoon in Munich in 2011, was speaking for his tribe when he wrote: "Most football writers fall into two categories: those who have been influenced by Brian Glanville, and those who should have been." This is in my copy of the 2010 edition of Glanville's opus, "The Story of the World Cup."

Glanville had been to 13 of those but it was in 1973 that he had decided to chronicle in a book what is now the most watched sporting event on the planet. For technical and...